SUMMER 2026 / FSUMED 17
Anderson’ s opening remarks, however, shifted the day’ s tone to the progress already made and immediately on the horizon.
McCullough used his platform to introduce Ashley Cannon, Ph. D., CGC, IPRD’ s director of Genetics Counseling, the master’ s program that is expected to enroll its first class of students in Fall 2027. With Cannon’ s arrival, IPRD now has leadership in place for all six of its programs that address every stage of the rare disease journey.
“ Hope is on the horizon and we are so proud to be a part of that,” Mc- Cullough said.
Eric Green, M. D., Ph. D., delivered a keynote message reflective of IPRD’ s progress and significance, while mapping his own personal history.
“ This institute is so rapidly growing. We have over 20 dedicated employees. There are over a dozen fully funded, unique research initiatives,” he said.“ There are multidiscipline, multi-university collaboration.
“ What I’ m most excited about is the future of this institute, and the next big step for this institute is rolling out the first of its kind, undiagnosed rare disease health center for pediatrics.”
FSU Health Precision Pediatrics, which Anderson described as“ truly transform ative,” opened in April. Anderson believes FHPP will“ move the needle when it comes to world class healthcare in the Panhandle.”
President McCullough followed.
“ It’ s just amazing to see what [ IPRD ] has turned into; to be able to attract the best and brightest people from across the state; the new professors to be here,” McCullough said.“ It was a perfect alignment, a crystallization, essentially, of a vision that I had for Florida State to do work in genomics... and thinking about how we might work in that area to bring together the data science and AI to develop diagnostics and eventually precision medicine to help cure some of these diseases.”
“ This is the epicenter of activities and progress in rare disease work,” Green told an audience that included fellow researchers, medical professionals, students and families impacted by rare diseases.“ Everybody is watching Florida.”
As one of the nation’ s foremost authorities in genetics, Green would know. He spent three decades with the National Human Genome Research Institute within the National Institutes of Health, including 15 years as its director, before joining Illumina as its chief medical officer in February.
Illumina is a global genomics and human health leader, with its innovations impacting the future of precision health. It develops DNA sequencing technologies— like the NovaSeq X used in IPRD’ s Diagnostic Lab— and other products to pioneer advances across multiple fields.
From 1990 to 2003, Green played an integral role in the international Human Genome Project, which was charged with sequencing the human genome. He described it this way:
“ It was about reading our( human) blueprint for the very first time; figuring out the order of the roughly 3 billion letters of one representation of the human genome.”
Photo: From left, FSU First Lady Jai Vartikar, IPRD’ s David Ledbetter, College of Medicine Dean Alma Littles, FSU Vice President for Research Stacey Patterson, FSU President Richard McCullough, Florida Rep. Adam Anderson, Quest Diagnostics Executive Scientific Director Sarah South, Illumina CMO Eric Green and IPRD Director Pradeep Bhide gather at the conclusion of the Rare Disease Day presentation.
Continued on next page >>>>